Religion

The Nazi cult of the organic

by Ellis Washington
March 26, 2011

  Gemeinnutzgeht vor Eigennutz.

      (The common good supersedes the private good.)

                                                                                  Nazi slogan

Prologue

Fanatical environmentalism, vegetarianism, animal rights and public health are four progressive policy initiatives that most people would not readily associate with Hitler and the Nazis. "Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic," wrote Jonah Goldberg. Indeed, "organic" and "holistic" were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organic-ized by the Nazis. In this sense, the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious when he said, "National Socialism is applied biology [Darwinism]."
Green fascism
Historically, German fascism was born out of a 19th century Romantic revolt against industrialization that philosophically mirrored aspects of Thoreau's transcendentalism. The distinction is that while Thoreau sought to separate himself from modernity, eco-fanatics like Al Gore and the Sierra Club seeks to translate their Romantic animosity against modernity into a totalizing government program that will control and dominate every aspect of our lives. Think: carbon credits, ethanol, micro cars and remote-controlled thermostats.

America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla 

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one. 

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition.

German mum jailed in sex education row

A mother in Germany has been sent to jail for refusing to pay a fine for taking her children out of government-run sex education classes.

Heinrich and Irene Wiens were initially fined €2,340 for refusing to send four of their children to the controversial classes in 2006.

But when the couple, who believe that the lessons oppose their Christian beliefs, refused to pay the fine on moral and legal grounds they were each sentenced to 43 days imprisonment.

Unconscionable

Now lawyers from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a leading religious liberty group, are asking the European Court of Human Rights to intervene in the case.

Roger Kiska, ADF Legal Counsel, said: “Parents, not the government, are the ones ultimately responsible for making educational choices for their children, and jailing them for standing on this universal right is simply unconscionable”.

Adventures in Multiculturalism

by Van Helsing 

March 25, 2011  

It's hard to see what people like David Cameron, Nikolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, andMaxime Verhagen mean when they say multiculturalism has failed. If we define multiculturalism as "Islamization imposed by treasonous liberals," it's working fine:

The longer Europe waits before fighting for its life against the Muslim–moonbat alliance that is literally pushing it off the map, the uglier that fight is going to be.

What they are turning off are their brains

by John Hayward 

Posted 03/25/2011 

This Saturday at 8:30 PM, trendy environmentalists, arrogant liberals, and the people dim enough to follow their lead will unite by plunging themselves into darkness to celebrate “Earth Hour.” This is supposed to somehow “take a stand against climate change,” according to the organizers.

Earth Hour is mostly of interest to the thinking people of the world because we like to turn on all our lights, and make fun of the poor chumps stumbling around in the dark with candles. If you’ve always wanted to see if a full-scale model of the Bat Signal really would paint a giant bat on low-hanging clouds, tomorrow is the perfect night to fire that baby up. Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute offers more thoughts along those lines here.

Back to the Past

This Saturday Celebrate, Don't Lament, Human Achievement

by Michelle Minton 

Posted 03/24/2011 

Human beings must exploit the environment.  It is how we survive—and thrive.  We don’t have claws or fur.  We don’t live in trees or burrow under the ground, and really, who would want to?  The only way that humanity has evolved from shivering in dark caves to curling up in a heated home, under a down blanked, with music, lights, and indoor plumbing, is by analyzing the things in our environment and altering them in ways that improve our lives.  It’s the human way.
Yet, there are some people out there who think that humanity is a blight upon the planet and that our every use of natural resources is a sin.  They want you to turn off your lights for an hour this Saturday for “Earth Hour” in a show of support for government action to fight climate change and enforce energy conservation.  It is your right to make that decision.  On the other hand, you can join the thousands of people around the world who will not shut off their lights during that hour, and instead will celebrate the achievements and innovations of humanity.

Stupidity never dies

Tsunami an economic disaster? Not necessarily

Posted: Mar 11, 2011 

By Howard Dicus

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The natural disaster of a tsunami could actually provide a temporary boost to the global economy.

Larry Summers, former director of President Obama's economic council and a former head of the World Bank, said rebuilding could temporarily boost the Japanese economy.

Summers suggested this in an interview Friday on CNBC. He added that the global economy is more resilient than most people think.

In Hawaii, disruptive weather events are good for some businesses but bad for others.

Stores that sell generators and hardware supplies experience a run on these items when a tsunami or bad weather approach; other retailers find their usual sales interrupted as people focus on evacuating and stockpiling essential supplies instead of their usual shopping.

HawaiiNewsNow correspondent Tannya Joaquin found three gas stations that had run out of fuel more than an hour before the first harbor wave was to have arrived.

The tsunami is an expense item for hotels, which have extensive plans in place to take care of guests' needs, usually through "vertical evacuation," escorting guests at least three stories up. Much of the expense comes from bringing in extra people to take care of guests.

Magic as an Art form at its best

Shadows

The magic of the Free Market

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

'It is happening right now'

By Paul Gottfried

A close friend of mine, Jost Bauch, who teaches general sociology and sociology of medicine as a part-time professor at the German University of Konstanz, has recently seen what he had of a career brought to a grinding halt.

Probably because of his non-leftist views, which stand out in the leftist and anti-nationalist German university system, Jost was never allowed to move beyond part-time work, despite his advanced degrees and multiple professional publications. Each week for years, this sexagenarian has driven several hours from his home near Frankfurt, where his wife works, to his place of employment in the southwest corner of the Federal Republic, all in return for an adjunct’s salary. A few years ago, I tried to find a position for him in the US, but the job he was seeking at a local branch of Penn State became de-authorized after a financial crunch. And so Jost went on commuting and teaching for subsistence-level wages—until a crisis erupted that is likely to end his association with Konstanz altogether. [VDARE.com note: Outside of this piece on VDARE.com, there seem to be no stories about this in English. Multilingual readers can read Sie wollen meine bürgerliche Existenz zerstören, ("They Are Trying To Destroy My Middle-Class Existence"), Junge Freheit, February 18, 2010].

'Libya' does not exist

It was a fake country from the beginning

by Justin Raimondo, March 14, 2011

The idea that there is a nation called “Libya” is the central problem with our understanding of what is going on in that fake “country,” the flaw in our projections of what will or ought to happen.
The country known today as Libya has only existed since the end of World War II, and was the product of a shotgun marriage of the three “provinces”: Tripolitania, in the West, Cyrenaica, in the East, and Fezzan in the South. “Libya” was created, first, by the Italians in 1933, who sought to incorporate the three distinct areas into a unified colony, under a single Fascist proconsul. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the British took control and installed an “emir” in Cyrenaica. Writing in the New York Daily News recently, Diedreick Vandewalle, a professor of government at Dartmouth, gives us some historical perspective:
“History has not been kind to this nation. Its three provinces — Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fazzan — were united for strategic purposes by the Great Powers after World War II. Cyrenaica in the east, and Tripolitania in the west, the two most important provinces, shared no common history and were suspicious of each other.

The Rise of State Capitalism

Eurasia Group's Kevin Kajiwara spoke today at the Second Annual CFA Institute Middle East Investment Conference in Abu Dhabi.
What he sees developing is state capitalism replacing globalization.Through state capitalism, states are increasingly becoming the dominant economic actors that "use markets primarily for political gain." Globally, state capitalism is practiced through four key channels, according to Kajiwara: national oil companies, state-owned enterprises, privately owned national champions, and sovereign wealth funds along with other key state-controlled investment vehicles.With regard to the Middle East, Kajiwara breaks the recent unrest into three key phases. The first phase was the secularist, nationalist rise of people power across the region, reinforced by social and global media coverage. The second phase was the state response, which has ranged from promises of reform to direct subsidies to crackdowns, and which has swung the tide from the protesters to state consolidation. The third and final phase is the reassertion of state power and the internationalization of conflicts.Kajiwara's analysis dovetails with my warnings that all though revolution of one sort or another is in the air and across the globe, this does not mean we will necessarily see an advancement toward liberty in the United States or elsewhere. The large majority of people don't understand what liberty is, how it works, or the gifts it brings. With this failure to understand, revolution will, in most cases, simply lead to a new forms of government abuse of the people.

Seven Minutes of Total Globalist Economic Confusion

The IMF is out with a new seven minute YouTube propaganda piece (see below) that stars former World Bank president and globalist Joseph Stiglitz. I don't think I have ever seen more confusion in seven minutes of presentation in my life. If you want to understand the talking points that the one worlders are currently using, Stiglitz knows them all and is able to spout them out as though they make sense at, as he says, a "high level".

Second Amendment

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
Thomas Jefferson

Government

“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.”
Barry Goldwater

Sceptics ?

“We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. ”
Stephen Schneider, environmental activist, in _Discover_, Oct. '89

Politicians

“The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless.”

“When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.”


James Dale Davidson

Lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment

by Stephen Davies 

Among the many aspects of the modern world invented in Scotland, we may
include the discipline of economics—indeed, the contemporary social
sciences in general. In the latter half of the eighteenth century
a whole congregation of brilliant intellects appeared in this small country
on the edge of Europe and articulated profound insights into what we
would now call economics, sociology, political science, cultural studies,
anthropology, history, and philosophy. Some, such as Adam Smith and
David Hume, are still well known, but there were other people such as
Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, James Millar, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry
Home (Lord Kames) who are equally worthy of study but receive far less
attention. Seldom has such a short period of time (a little more than two
generations) seen such a burst of insight and ideas in such a small space.
Moreover, the ferment and vitality of Scots society at this time was not
confined to purely intellectual pursuits. The same period also saw a
flourishing of the arts and literature, in areas such as painting (Allan
Ramsay), architecture (Robert Adam), poetry (Robert Burns), and prose
fiction (Tobias Smollet and later James Hogg). It was also the society that produced figures such as James Watt and Thomas

Macadam, who contributed to advances in technology and engineering.

Most dramatic however was the economic transformation of Scotland into one of the most dynamic and
prosperous parts of Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century Scotland was at the forefront of the
nascent Industrial Revolution.

On Price Controls and "DoubleThink"

Ibsen Martinez


I live in a Latin American neo-populist petrocracy.

For the last decade, my government's economic officials have pledged themselves to the "comprehensive, humanist, endogenous and socialist development of the nation", whatever that means.
Perhaps that gobbledygook just means that in Venezuela it is much easier to fetch a bottle of premium Scotch whisky at any low-income neighborhood's supermarket than a bottle of milk, a pound of sugar or a dozen of eggs. Paradoxically, the local branch of Audi set an all-time Latin American sales record during 2007 by catching a 22% share of the region's luxury cars market.
To the average Venezuelan citizen, "petropolitics" is not just another catchy word. Despite the hard fact that our main customer is the U.S., my oil-rich country's notoriously outspoken leader is the perfect embodiment of anti-Americanism in our continent. To say that American motorists end up paying for Venezuela's Russian Sukhoi US 28 Soviet-era jet fighters and hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikovs assault rifles is not an overstatement.